With Intent

He deserved it and more besides. I will pay my penance but I am not sorry and I refuse to feel any level of remorse – not for him. He isn’t worth the time of day. I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction.  

I was not always the criminal that stands before you today.

I did have a normal life to begin with, way back when.

I was born nineteen years ago, Kathryn Louise Singleton, over the years this has had many incarnations. These days it is just Kate, plain, simple Kate, unassuming, unpretentious Kate Singleton. Reasonably anonymous, which if you ask me is by far the best way to be if you end up in a place like this.

Not exactly the Ritz is it? The best way to survive in here is to remember your Ps and Qs, to always be courteous to those that have been here before, the re-offenders who the screws nickname ”visitors”.

They are the ones who are constantly in and out of this place; they have limited social skills and usually have abilities on the same level. This is quickly becoming something of a nightmare and is fuelled by a high-dependency drug habit, the hard class As. God knows how they get it in here but they do. The newspapers are full of it. Everybody knows, it is a well-documented fact, that if you need to support a drug habit, it is easier to do so in a place like this then it is in the world outside.  That is why you get so many so-called “visitors” come back here, it is a way of life. You get back out into the real world to act as a responsible, reformed, civilised member of society with good intentions and the lot. All well and good, it works in theory, earn brownie points and get out on good behaviour, attend classes and all that jazz. Anger management is a good one to take if you want to get noticed by all the right kind of people. Put smiles on faces and jump through various invisible hoops put in place to tick various boxes and climb the privileges ladder in terms of an extra phone call home or an extra twenty minutes TV. Whatever it is that you want to get out of this place, there is usually a way. That is of course if you know how to play the game, there is usually a way of working the system in your favour.

My father named me Kathryn, Mum said, almost from the point of conception with K and Y he said, it made me sound distinguished and made me stand out from the crowd. Exactly what you don’t want in a place like this, and truth be told also got me into some serious bother in the school playground. Dad had high hopes for his princess. I was his first-born and he wanted me to achieve great things.

He is dead now. Has been for fifteen years.

No, I didn’t kill him, of that I am innocent. It was a car accident. Hit head-on by a drunk driver.  Dad was coming home from working his shift as a security guard at one of the big supermarkets, nothing particularly high flying it. However according to Mum the pay was reasonable and she always liked a man in uniform.

They were expecting another baby. I was excited about having a sibling. It was due after Christmas, which would have been perfect. I can remember telling my friend that Santa was going to bring me this baby for Christmas. Apparently I went to great pains to explain that this was a real baby, not a doll.

Mum was five months gone at that point, but the accident changed everything. I remember Mum getting the phone call. I was getting out of the bath and just about to start the process of bedtime. Dad always came in after work to read me a story. I remember that it was going to be “Chicken Licken” that night. This was the story about the little yellow chicken who was hit on the head by a falling acorn and ran off to tell the King that the sky was falling in.

You’d have thought the sky was falling in around our house that evening. I don’t remember the order of events. The whole evening remains a blur. I do remember the phone ringing and my Mum muttering something about inconsiderates ringing at a time when most civilised people like herself were trying to put small children to bed, she wrapped me in a soft pink towel and went downstairs saying that she’d be back in a minute.

I remember a huge commotion downstairs. I knew it was Mum. She let out a scream that shook the house to its foundations. Even now, when I close my eyes at night I can still hear it. Years later, I can honestly say that I have never heard a sound like that before or since.

 I have never witnessed such intense grief and despair. I remember the lady from across the road, physically battering down the door. Then my Grandmother magically appeared amidst this cloud of confusion. I remember being dressed in a rough, hurried manner and then being bundled into Grandma’s rusty old Fiat. I remember that old car being something of a heap and the fact that Dad used to joke that you could always hear my Grandma coming as she had a tendency to rattle all the way up the hill.

It was a miracle that we weren’t stopped by some Copper or flashed by some strategically placed camera designed to uphold the laws of traffic.

I remember being rushed down this endless maze of corridors, not being able to move fast enough. By the time we got to Dad, the guy in the white coat pulled at the flimsy grey curtain, but we were too late. Some young nurse was saying that she was “very sorry Mrs Singleton,” Mum took one look at Dad and with that she made a sound of a strangled cat and fell to the ground screaming. She was clutching her stomach. I had no idea what was happening. There was this very audible squelching sound and then suddenly there was a massive pool of blood coming up from underneath my Mother. Buzzers everywhere. People in white coats and blue uniforms coming at us from every direction.

Grandma swept me up. We were taken aside by a kind looking nurse who rubbed by hair and called me “a brave little soul”. It was her that ushered us into this little side-room with a couple of chairs and a coffee machine. She got me a glass of water and made my Grandmother a strong cup of tea, apologising that she was on duty and unable to offer her anything stronger.

The next week was dreadful and started with a double funeral. The night that my Father died I was told that my Mother had had a little boy, my little brother I don’t know whether it is medically correct to say that my Mother miscarried the baby or that she actually gave birth. If the baby was formed enough to be known as male and that Mum was at the point of pregnancy that would warrant a funeral then I guess that she was somewhere between the two.

Mum had her little boy. I never saw him, he was tiny, his body was formed with some semblance of all the relevant bits and pieces, he was born dead, too premature to survive. Mum never ever talks about it now, but I would have liked to have seen him just to say goodbye.

He was named Christopher a buried alongside my father in a miniature white coffin and commended to the Earth with a little blue teddy. Mum said it was like burying her soul that day but that was the last time I remember her talking about Christopher.

Things went downhill from that day and that is when the rot set in. Life as I knew it changed and none of it good. The day that we received that phone call I truly believe that my Mum lost the will to live. She carried on in autopilot, merely surviving to this day. When my Father died not only did I lose my Dad, I also lost a brother and somewhere along the line I lost my Mum too.

I am sure that psychologists would say that is where my problems lie, no Father figure around, an uninterested, uninvolved mother and a blame game situation over the death of my unborn brother. In reality, my “problems” run so much deeper that and are more difficult to explain.

After my Father died, my Mother became a completely different person. It terrified me. I felt responsible. I had to be there and I had to help her. I felt that if I wasn’t with her that something dreadful would happen and at five years old that I had to protect her at all costs.

Mum was a very beautiful woman, or at least she was when my Father was alive. She had a figure that most would die for, proper 1940s hourglass figure, piecing green eyes and a full-lipped smile. Wherever she walked she could light up a room and she never failed to turn heads.

All that changed, she would snap at me constantly, telling me to get out from under her feet, telling me to stop watching her and to leave her to have her space. She stopped caring; it was like the whole concept of living was beyond her. Her appearance was in ruins, her hair became a tangled mess and she lost a phenomenal amount of weight. To begin with, people were commenting on how good she looked, how it suited her. Then it became too much. People would look and stare, children in the playground would point, their parents would cross the road. Everyone was worried. Nobody would talk to me.

Grandma took on the role of the mundane. Of an evening it would be her that would make the evening meal, it would be her that read me a story at bedtime and it would be her that tucked me in at night.

At this point Mum started drinking. My parents had always had a glass of wine together of an evening but this was something else, this was vodka. Mum made no attempt to hide the fact either, I remember hearing raised voices and Mum saying that she did it to numb the pain. She just wanted to forget the whole sorry mess.

 Shortly after this I found Mum collapsed on the kitchen floor. I thought she was dead and I cried down the phone to Grandma. That was the day that I went to school without breakfast. That was the day that Grandma informed Mum that she had a problem and that she had to do something about it.

Mum a good number of months to get her act together and actually pick up the phone. Kudos, it took a great deal of courage for her to do that. She cried as she flicked through the local phone directory and the doctor saying that “the first step to combating alcoholism is to admit that there is a problem”.  Mum turned away and muttered something, after a couple of days she bit the bullet because she then spoke to someone. I was pleased. I wanted my Mum back.

Mum always said she was only doing it to keep Grandma happy and to get people off her back. Slowly, things began to change. Mum gave up the vodka. She was hell to live with.  But at the end of the day she gave up the vodka. Grandma told to hang on in there as things would get worse before they got better.

Slowly Mum managed to lift herself out of the hole and that there was life beyond the bottle and that help was at hand in the form of him.

I think it is probably best if he is to remain nameless. He is what I would term as nothing more than a waste of skin not fit for survival among the rest of civilised society. He ruined my life. It is him that ought to pay. Not me. They should have locked him up and thrown away the key.

In the beginning I liked him. He was what they would call a “support buddy” at this group Mum attended. They would meet up outside of the group and discuss times of crisis, talking each other through whatever was amiss in their lives. To begin with not a great deal happened, Mum had become very stand-offish. She found it very hard to let anybody in. Yet, somehow she began to pick herself up and she began to take care of herself. She began to go out more. She was happier and she began to smile again. In the meantime, her “support buddy” featured more in everyday conversation, he graduated from being referred to by his surname and became known as him.

Mum seemed happy. I was grateful that there was somebody out there that could do that. He would come round on the odd occasion and do something like fix the broken fence at the bottom of the garden, he touched up the paintwork that needed doing in the hall, he even relayed the flooring.

On my tenth birthday I came downstairs ready for school, he was sitting at the kitchen table having breakfast with Mum. She told me that he was moving in with us on a permanent basis, what did I think? I didn’t have a great deal to say. I knew that he made my Mum happy and we had always been pleasant with each other, so in the end I agreed.

Big mistake.

I was unsure of my Mother having another man in the house full-time but these things happen and life moves on. Life in fact was fine, we went out for meals as a family, we went to the zoo, Mum was happy, it was how things should be and I felt positive about us as a unit.

Then it changed. On a Wednesday night after school. Mum was visiting friends who had recently moved and I was upstairs. There was a knock at my door and he came in asking about my day at school and about what had happened during the day. He sat on my bed and put his hand on my knee. I tried to push it away, he pushed back harder… then he was on top of me with his hand in my knickers. I tried to scream, but no sound came out. Then the next thing I knew was that he had his hand over my mouth pushing down with so much force that I could hardly breathe, he was unbuttoning his trousers. I had never seen anything like it before in my life, it made me feel sick.

Instinctively, I tried to get away, tried to break free. He was having none of it and lent his entire weight upon my body.

The pain was unimaginable. I felt as if somebody was tearing me inside. No sooner had it all started then it was over. He got up and looked at me in absolute disgust. I was speechless and shaking. Every part of my body was screaming in agony. I just wanted to curl up and die. He on the other hand pulled me from the bed. I hadn’t even noticed the blood. He pulled me into the bathroom, muttered something vile, telling me that I disgusted him.

I never did tell Mum, I could never find the right words and things got worse. Having thought that he had got away with it, this became an almost daily occurrence. He thought nobody knew, but I knew and it repulsed me. I felt dirty. I withdrew into myself, deeming myself unworthy and undeserving of friends. My schoolwork suffered and at home I became totally unrecognisable as to the girl that I had once been.

When I was fourteen Mum announced that she was going to have another baby I prayed that the baby would be safe and healthy. The pregnancy was flawless and Mum gave birth to a daughter. Nadine-Mae, She was the image of our Mum. She was born with a shock of black spiky hair. She was amazing. I fell in love with her immediately.

As Nadine grew she became more and more beautiful by the day, she mesmerised me, I was totally in awe. Equally she loved me without question and without pressure. Mum used to laugh as Nadine became my living shadow and my reason for living despite the internal chaos.

Nadine is nearly six at school and getting big. Six weeks ago I came home earlier than expected. I had done the weekly shop in record time.

I put the key in the lock and opened the door, something didn’t feel right. I called out but there was no answer. I dumped the bags. I was on autopilot, taking the stairs, two at a time.

Nadine’s door was slightly open. I could hear his muffled voice. I was in there like a flash. I had my hands around his neck. I yanked as hard as I could. The force of my actions had him on the floor; he hit his head on the way down and lay at my feet like a sack of potatoes. Nadine clung to me, naked and bleeding.

Yes I did it. No I don’t feel any remorse. He is in a stable but critical condition in hospital, but they say he will survive… that’s what they think.

When I get out of here, he is a dead man, I promise you that…